1. Technical Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to communication systems; and, more particularly, it relates to processing of burst noise affected signals within such communication systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. One such type of communication system that has been of significant interest lately is a communication system that employs iterative error correction codes (ECCs). There are a variety of types of ECCs (e.g., turbo codes, turbo trellis codes, Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, LDPC (Low Density Parity Check) codes, etc.). Communications systems with iterative codes and iterative ECCs are often able to achieve lower bit error rates (BER) than alternative codes for a given signal to noise ratio (SNR).
A continual and primary directive in this area of development has been to try continually to lower the SNR required to achieve a given BER within a communication system. The ideal goal has been to try to reach Shannon's limit in a communication channel. Shannon's limit may be viewed as being the data rate to be used in a communication channel (e.g., most typically in the context of an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) communication channel), having a particular SNR, that achieves error free transmission through the communication channel. In other words, the Shannon limit is the theoretical bound for channel capacity for a given modulation and code rate. It is of course noted that certain communication channels may suffer from deficiencies other than AWGN (e.g., burst noise, distortion, interference, fading, etc.).
For any particular communication system application areas, near-capacity achieving error correction codes are very desirable. Generally speaking, within the context of communication systems that employ ECC codes, there is a first communication device at one end of a communication channel with encoder capability and second communication device at the other end of the communication channel with decoder capability. In many instances, one or both of these two communication devices includes encoder and decoder capability (e.g., within a bi-directional communication system). ECCs codes can be applied in a variety of additional applications as well, including those that employ some form of data storage (e.g., hard disk drive (HDD) applications and other memory storage devices) in which data is encoded before writing to the storage media, and then the data is decoded after being read/retrieved from the storage media.